


Eggshell

by leiascully



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Memories, fragile masculinity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-11-09 16:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11108592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: There was something so fragile about men.





	Eggshell

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: post-film  
> A/N: Listen, I've seen this film twice now, and Steve as an example of masculinity so fragile is really pretty incredible. I get it that the dick jokes and the "I sleep with women" are played for laughs, but also, let a strong woman be strong without it threatening a man.   
> Disclaimer: _Wonder Woman_ and all related characters are the property of DC Comics. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

There was something so fragile about men.

She thought at first it was all of humanity. She had had little experience of them. Studying them, as she had studied the works of Clio on the bodily pleasures, had had little to do with the experience. She had learned that the first time one of the Amazons took her to bed, after hours of fighting and revelry and a feast that had left them both sated. It had been the same studying the great writers on the techniques of battle. Antiobe had set her numerous readings at the beginning of her training, cautioning Diana all the same that no theory held up entirely on the field of combat. 

Steve was dying when they met, trapped in the wreckage of the machine that had brought him. He had recovered quickly, but not as quickly or as completely as she had. He had worn his wounds into London; she had still been able to trace the track of the one across his shoulder in Veld. But the woman in the trenches who had lost everything had not had the same quality; Sameer and the Chief lacked it too. 

It had begun not long after she had rescued him. She had noticed it first as he clambered out of the bathing pool, asserting his superiority to others of his sex, as if it mattered to her. He did the same in the boat. There was a defensiveness in him as he answered her simple questions.

Each of them dealt with the horrors they had seen in different ways, she supposed. Chief left, as she had, to fight other battles. Sameer lived other lives. The women and children in the villages tried to clean up and pick up the pieces of their towns. They kept steel in their souls somehow. Other men, soldiers and sons, staggered on, shellshocked, broken, healing. Maybe it was because they didn't deny their wounds that they found their way to recovery. Charlie drank and screamed in his sleep and picked the wrong fights and denied, always, that there was anything amiss. But Steve, the first man she'd ever met, insisted every moment on his relative superiority to others of his kind, even as he followed her into battle.

She wasn't certain what it was in him that gave him the need to be correct. She had always lived in her own rightness. Diana had never had cause to doubt herself; no compass inside her had ever steered her false. It was possible that Steve doubted the world, not her strength or his own, but still it puzzled her. Even the night they shared a bed, he took his own counsel on her pleasure, as if she didn't know best what would bring her the sweetest sensations. Surely she was the expert in herself, if nothing else, though she had proved her worthiness to him in a hundred other ways. 

Later, in the leisure of peace, she thought of the things he had said that might explain the delicacy of the veneer he maintained. He had tried doing nothing, he'd told her, and perhaps he was making up for the shame of that all along, for the guilt of standing by when he was a person of vigor, a person whose strengths could serve the cause of righteousness. Others had not had that luxury. Chief hadn't, when his people were being destroyed. Sameer hadn't, when he was stealing his supper from the more fortunate and more gullible, who never imagined he could be deceiving them. She had seen for herself the way that other men with lighter skin treated both of her friends, dismissive, the way the generals in London had looked down on her.

She wondered what would have happened if she had indulged Steve's delicateness, let him make her subservient when she outmatched him in nearly every way. He had tried, to some degree, in the name of teaching her about the world outside the blue waters of Themiscyra. Nearly everything had gone wrong until she had taken matters into her own hands. 

She had walked through the no man's land. Steve had thought it impossible, a feat of strength and courage beyond imagining. It had been a task beyond the men in the trenches. But she was no man. She knew herself, as truly as she could. She trusted her training, the strength she had built along with her sisters-in-arms. And so she walked through the darkness, through the worst of a world that contained ice cream and babies and ridiculous hats and holding hands and music and dancing of a sort and snow along with every grim truth of war, and she brought light to some and eternal night to others, and it surprised her how little effort it took.

People were so fragile, and so unexpectedly strong, nothing like her straightforward Amazons. And Steve - her first human friend, the first person she'd saved - for all his strength, was somehow the least resilient of them all. But he had made a hero's choice in the end, and that was what mattered most.

She missed him. He was a contradiction of above average complexity, or so she would have told him, if he had been there to hear it, if only because it might have made him feel better. He had wasted so much energy insisting that the world was a certain way and that he occupied a certain place in it, but he had also tried to make it a better place. There was, in a way, something tender about a man so unconvinced of his strength and his goodness that he had to insist on it, although she might not have found it so if she were human herself, relegated to secretarial duties. Diana Prince would have been someone very different from Diana of Themiscyra, in some other world.

There wasn't time to waste on those other worlds: those lesser Dianas, those worthier Steves. She dealt with the world she had at her feet, and made sure that the memories of her friends were honored, and watched the children of the world grow up stronger than their parents, and smiled.


End file.
